I’ve always been excited by using our knowledge of how our brains work to create better marketing, advertising, and sales strategies. That led me to write Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing (Wiley, 2011) as well as my blog Neuromarketing. I always emphasize practical applications, not theory. I’m the founder of Dooley Direct, a marketing consultancy, and I co-founded College Confidential, the leading college-bound website. That business was acquired by Hobsons, a unit of UK-based DMGT, where I served as VP Digital Marketing and continue in a consulting role. I’ve spent years in direct marketing as the co-founder of a successful catalog firm, and before that directed corporate planning for a Fortune 1000 company. You can learn more about me and my speaking at RogerDooley.com. Follow me on Twitter at @rogerdooley, or on Google Plus at Roger Dooley.

Build Loyalty Like Apple: Define Your Enemy

A quick challenge: name a company with a more loyal, energized customer base than Apple.

I bet you had to work to come up with one. And, the loyalty of Apple customers isn’t a new thing – it dates to their earliest years. Indeed, Apple’s survival through challenging times of low market share and management mistakes is due in large part to the fact that it was never abandoned by its devoted user base. Multiple factors created this amazing loyalty – brilliant design, highly original products, intuitive user experience, creative marketing, and more. But there’s one element that gets mentioned less but was a key driver of the fanatical loyalty of many Apple owners: Apple created an enemy, the PC and its users, and built that enemy into much of its marketing.

From Brand to Social Identity About the same time as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were working on the early Apple devices, social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner were developing the social identity theory. In short, the theory states that your self image is defined in part by the social group or groups you consider yourself to be part of. For example, think “Cubs fan,” “Libertarian,” or “Scientologist.”

Normally, of course, the brand of consumer electronic devices you own doesn’t place you in any kind of social group. I own a Samsung receiver, an LG monitor, a Sony game console, and a Dell laptop, but I’m not quite ready to have any one of those logos tattooed on me, nor do I even feel any particular kinship to other owners.

Turning a brand into a cult required using one of Tajfel’s other research findings: it is ridiculously simple to divide people into groups and create a rivalry. Tajfel’s experiments placed people into one or another group using meaningless criteria – say a coin toss. Despite the arbitrary way Tajfel’s groups were created, as the experiment continued the members of each group became increasingly loyal to their own group and discriminated against the members of the other group.

Upstart brands occasionally do attack their competition, they usually focus on product characteristics: performance, price, ease of use, etc. Apple took a different path: they attacked the PC users themselves, and drew a sharp distinction between Mac users and everyone else.

The Early Years When Apple sought to define their users as different and better, they called on the formidable skills of director Ridley Scott. He created what most critics rank as one of the best ads of all time, the iconic 1984 ad:

PC users are portrayed as gray, mindless drones, taking direction from a Big Brother-like character. The young woman representing Apple, of course, is young, fit, attractive, and even heroic in her quest to smash the giant screen.

The following year, Apple’s rather dark “lemmings” ad took aim at PC users once again:

If anything, this ad portrayed PC users in an even more unflattering way – they were business-suited lemmings marching blindly off a cliff. The “hero” in this case is far less dramatic as he peels off his blindfold before leaping over the edge.

Both of these ads draw the sharpest possible line between “us” and “them.”

Mac vs. PC: The Humans As time passed, presenting PC users as mindless drones became a less viable strategy, since now most of the market had a computer and insulting your potential customers would be risky. So, Apple adopted a much softer approach with their “Get a Mac” campaign that ran from 2006 to 2009:

In this long-running ad series, the “PC,” portrayed by John Hodgman, wears a suit, and, though amiable, is a nerd and a bumbling klutz. The “Mac” (Justin Long) is casual, cool, and competent. There were 66 spots in all, and each typically pointed out an area where the PC had issues: a propensity to get viruses, long boot times, occasional crashes, etc.

Even though these ads do focus on traditional features and benefits, the consistent theme through the series is, once again, people focused. Mac users (“us”) are hip, don’t get rattled, and end up with the girl. PC users (“them”), on the other hand, are nerdy doofuses. Not only did these ads present a reason for PC owners to convert to Macs, at the same time they built the social identity of Mac owners.

Tribes and Seth Godin Even though Seth Godin doesn’t talk about building enemies, he’s emphasized the need to create “tribes.” That’s a concept Henri Tajfel would totally understand – in his experiments, he was turning randomly selected individuals into mini-tribes. As Godin says in Tribe Management,

What people really want is the ability to connect to each other, not to companies. So the permission is used to build a tribe, to build people who want to hear from the company because it helps them connect, it helps them find each other, it gives them a story to tell and something to talk about…

People form tribes with or without us. The challenge is to work for the tribe and make it something even better.

Build Your Tribe, Find Your Enemy If you want to make your brand part of your customer’s social identity, you have to make your customers feel different than the people who use a competing brand. The sharper the distinction (even if in real terms it’s not all that meaningful), the more effective this strategy will be. Apple’s approach was smart, as it built on pre-existing stereotypes of Mac and PC users. Even though these stereotypes may not have been accurate, their existence made Apple’s job easier.

Is your brand part of your customer’s social identity now? Do you have some good examples of “us vs. them” branding? Share your thoughts with other readers in a comment!

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I have to say that I find this kind of marketing at the very least distasteful, if not detestable. Why make the engine of your company’s growth the same human weakness that leads to pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and war?

Dave, I think it’s always a good idea to step back and look at the ethical implications of specific techniques. Creating a rivalry like this, though, doesn’t really cross any problematic boundaries in my opinion. In this case, as the far smaller player, most of the benefit accrued to Apple. In more evenly matched rivalries, like Ford pickup owners vs. Chevy pickup owners, both sides may benefit from higher loyalty and more self-identification with the brand.

A few months ago, my teenage son wrote a school paper on the famous Apple Superbowl commercial that you spotlight. While I remembered the commercial, looking through his paper brought the effectiveness of having a defined enemy into sharp relief. Apple never had to say ‘Microsoft’ or ‘IBM’ because their enemy was something bigger, the conformity that they were telling us other brands represented. “Apple’s enemy is drudgery and conformity” is something people could immediately understand and identify with.

Thanks for a great article just as I am working on the same challenge.

Good point, cafl. I think one key difference is that Pepsi never attacked Coke drinkers in their ads, but rather the taste of the product itself. They did try to build the image of a Pepsi drinker as young, fun-loving, and attractive (Pepsi Generation, etc.), but never resorted to portraying Coke drinkers as old, boring, and conformist.

One other important difference was the strength of the Coke brand. PC market branding was fragmented from the start, and other than IBM (hardly a warm and fuzzy brand) no other player had much brand strength. As Microsoft emerged as the most identifiable brand representing Mac competition, Apple did indeed begin to reference them in their campaigns. For all of Microsoft’s success, though, its brand is hardly as iconic and linked to emotion as Coca Cola. Pepsi had to overcome the fact that they could win a blind taste test, but not a labeled one!

most of the commenters focuse on the “build an enemy” issue, but IMHO the real point of the article is this sentence: “Is your brand part of your customer’s social identity now?” everything must be done in order to have your consumers happily sporting your products AND talking positively about them in social spaces (both phisical and virtual). take Nespresso (I hope is popular in USA as it is in EU): if you drink Nespresso you think you are a coffee connaisseur since you can choose between a couple dozen different (well… almost different!) scents, so sticking to Nespresso you’re part of a tribe (the coffee connaisseur) adn you’re standing from the crowd (the people who just drink “any other coffee”). so at the end, building “social relevancy” for a brand is always a matter of letting your costumer being different form someone and similar to someone else!

Sauternes, that’s the positive side of brand and identity… if you have a strong and desirable brand, you don’t need to pick on a competitor. Nike, for example, focuses on building its own image, and wouldn’t choose to single out any competitor. If you were starting an upstart athletic shoe company, you might decide to pick on Nike. New Balance, for example, has used the theme of “we don’t make shoes in third-world sweatshops with child labor,” though they haven’t gone so far as to single out Nike as doing that.

This is the same techniques cults use: People outside the cult are the enemy. Also, not coincidentally, why Obama used the “hate the rich” motif. Many of his techniques are right out of Cults 101. Words used to identify insiders, these words repeated continuously. Yea we all know them, CHANGE, HOPE then FORWARD.

The brain is very open to the power of suggestion, and once brainwashed, it prefers to remain so rather than expend the extra energy necessary to question, to have to rethink ideas already neatly implanted.

If you voted for Obama, believing his absurd excuses, overlooked his countless lies, you’ve been had! You need deprogramming! Yep, it’s true, THINK about it.

Interesting, Zedd. I think another similarity to the recent election is the degree to which many voters identified emotionally with a candidate, particularly Obama. Watching commentary on Twitter, these folks were really emotionally invested in the outcome, and it was clearly more for them than a dispassionate choice based on policies, experience, etc. I don’t have stats to support this, but I’d guess a much higher percentage of Obama supporters would say “I’m an Obama person!” than a similar expression of support for Romney. I’d guess the latter’s supporters would be more likely to say, “I support Romney’s policies” or “Romney will do a better job,” than, “I’m a Romney person!”